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This is my third novel by Urrea and it has opened a new dimension of this author for me. One of his previous books, The House of Broken Angels, was an affectionate portrait of an extended Mexican-American family in San Diego; I’ve read that one of the angels was based on Urrea himself. This book centers on the experience of a woman who grew up in the New York area and dispensed coffee and...

Now I’ve read four books by Jennifer Johnston and continue to be impressed by her work. This one was shortlisted for the Booker prize. She is not a well-known writer outside Ireland and without Reading Matters I would not have known about her. In the first book I read by her, The Gingerbread Woman, the main character declares to a visitor that there will be no talk of “the...

I listened to this book having recently read Künstlers in Paradise that I liked so much. This one was about an interesting family dynamic. I will be restrained about plot revelations because those revelations were my favorite part of the book. Fin was so-named because after his birth, his father wandered into a theatre showing a French film that was just ending. He was clear that this son would...

This silly little book was published in 1940 and is told in the voice of Norman Huntley, a young man who plays the organ in the cathedral town of Cornford. When it begins Norman and his friend were traveling in Ireland and to amuse themselves while chatting with the sexton of an old church, invent an old woman named Miss Hargreaves. A letter is written, one thing leads to another, and Bob’s...